Tuesday, February 27, 2007

A telescope made of cans

It has an uncanny resemblance to the real thing, but it's just a model. A team of 20 engineers spent a collective total of 80 hours building a model of Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Materials used: cans and what appear to be empty popcorn buckets.

The model is 3 metres (10 feet) long, and contains 3234 cans. I could be wrong, but I believe this is the most ambitious canned-food-based model of an astronomical instrument ever constructed.

The model was displayed for a week then disassembled, with the canned goods donated to charity.

The real JWST is being built by Northrop Grumman for NASA and is scheduled to launch in 2013. Although it promises to revolutionise our understanding of the early universe, it is billions of dollars over budget, and some scientists have argued it is draining money from smaller missions.

The choice of construction material for the model is therefore a bit ironic, since advocates of smaller missions seem to wish the real JWST had been “canned".